Yelling “Fire” on a Crowded Knoll

Tom Zoellner considers a new history of the Kent State shootings by Brian VanDeMark.

By Tom ZoellnerJanuary 9, 2025

• History

IN SPRING 2024, college presidents around the nation questioned whether to call in law enforcement against Gaza protesters. They fretted about optics, lawsuits, political heat, and lost donations. But a singular fear hovered over everything: what if a cop’s gun should go off in a heated encounter and kill a student?

There was a gruesome precedent for this worry, still front of mind after 54 years. As PhD student Jonathan Ben-Menachem put it to The Independent just before the New York Police Department flooded his campus: “We’re terrified that there’s going to be a second Kent State at Columbia.”

The name of a Midwestern university is well-known shorthand for violence against students. On May 4, 1970, a squadron of the Ohio National Guard fired on a crowd of unarmed Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University, wounding nine and killing four. The shootings triggered an emergency shutdown of campuses nationwide, lest there be more bloodshed, and contributed to the anti-war movement’s dissolution. It also left a mountain of questions that have still never been answered.

Multiple grand juries, outside probes, and court cases brought scrutiny to the event, as did a welter of articles and books (among them, the astonishingly good Kent State: What Happened and Why written by James Michener and a staff of assistants just months after the bloodshed). To this tall stack, US Naval Academy history professor Brian VanDeMark now adds Kent State: An American Tragedy, a serious and substantial reckoning with the multicausal disaster that casts a shadow across academia 54 years later, especially as the picket signs come out and buildings are occupied.

Perhaps owing to its roots within the medieval church, the college campus—with its stately buildings, parklike expanses, and promise of social mobility—occupies a semisacred place in the global consciousness, and the specter of armed troops indiscriminately shooting within it seemed a terrible profanation, even in the febrile year of 1970 when President Richard Nixon denounced college protesters as “bums,” some of the worst people in the country, and a significant portion of the public agreed with him.

In this illuminating and well-written account, VanDeMark makes two major contributions to the known facts. The first is that he persuaded guardsman Matt McManus to go on the record about what may well have set off the fusillade of gunfire from the Ohio National Guard on a cluster of unarmed protesters standing downhill from them at 12:24 p.m. Panicked at the sight of angry students drawing near, McManus ordered guardsmen to shoot in the air over the heads of protesters, he confesses. This likely set off the chain of 67 shots from the guardsmen’s M-1 Garand rifles directly into the crowd.

McManus also identifies himself as the first one to discharge a weapon, even though he merely put bird shot into the sky. It was still enough to roll the general thunder. “I placed the shotgun directly in my belly and I yelled, ‘Fire one round in the air! Fire in the air!” reported McManus, who then hit the ground. But his fellow troops may have just heard the word “fire,” plus the shotgun blast, assumed that they were under attack, and misunderstood it as an official order to defend themselves.

The other service provided by this book is in the first chapter, in which VanDeMark examines some of the capricious rhetoric from the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society, two groups on the sharp leftward edge of the anti-war movement who were not key actors at Kent State that day but who nevertheless helped raise the temperature in unhelpful ways.

A reader is first tempted to wonder if VanDeMark is writing revisionist conservative history or trying to exonerate the Ohio National Guard for the slayings. But this impression is dispelled in later chapters in which the guard and its inept leadership come in for withering criticism. Perhaps because of the shocking and unequal application of force and the clear set of victims, most accounts of Kent State have failed to fully examine how activists’ in-your-face provocations escalated the anger on all sides. VanDeMark does this in such a way that does not feel like bothsidesism or victim-blaming.

He covers some well-trodden ground around the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention and working-class white voters’ shift to the Republican Party before discussing how the Weathermen’s call to “chaosify Amerika,” “off the pigs,” bomb buildings, and perhaps even kill white babies in a blur of revolutionary hubris helped alienate Middle America from the anti-war message and caused many undecided citizens to mentally lump all protesters into a single unattractive package. They had been given the best that the country had to offer and seemed to be rejecting it like spoiled toddlers. “We psyched ourselves up with a disgusting romanticization of violence,” recalled one former agitator.

By 1968, the fervor at Columbia and Berkeley had reached into “a carefully groomed, 1,850-acre campus dotted with mostly mustard-brick buildings about thirty miles south of Cleveland and ten miles east of Akron,” a previously drowsy place serving mainly working-class kids who paid little to no tuition and were raised in households influenced by “unionism and a loyalty to New Deal politics, economic populism, Catholic social gospel, Christian existentialism, secular Jewish radicalism, the Old Left, commitment to racial equality, and Cold War liberalism.” As a representative portrait of a large Midwestern campus—the second largest in Ohio—it was as unremarkable as it gets. A poll in 1967 showed that students approved of military intervention in Vietnam by a four-to-one ratio, but those numbers had reversed by the following year.

Kent State was hardly a breeding ground of revolution or a national center of resistance. The radical Students for a Democratic Society never attained a membership of more than 1.4 percent of the students. “They couldn’t answer any of my questions and they didn’t know what they were talking about at all,” complained 19-year-old Allison Krause, who never went to another meeting but continued to oppose the war. She would lose her life in the shooting the following spring.

When Mark Rudd, a mini-celebrity after occupying Columbia’s buildings, visited Kent State’s campus to give a talk, only a few went, and one attendee called him “abusive, obscene, biased, and boring.” Rudd then had the bad manners to walk off with the ticket money.

Less than a month before the shootings, a guest speech by fellow radical Jerry Rubin went no better. He told 1,500 students in attendance that they should “quite literally” kill their parents. “Quit being students. Become criminals,” he urged them. “We have to disrupt every institution and break every law. We should have more laws so we can break them, too.” Few Kent State students heard it as anything other than shock comedy, but his remarks got wide traction among townspeople who saw it as a validation of their worst fears about long-haired campus freaks. As one local put it, “The university had grown in what seemed a few short years from the polite, sometimes rambunctious boy next door into a hulking, snarling teenage neighbor from hell.”

The night after Nixon announced the war’s expansion into Cambodia on April 30, students rioted in downtown Kent after the bars closed, breaking windows and starting a bonfire in the middle of North Water Street. The mayor appealed to Governor Jim Rhodes, an “up-by-the-bootstraps, rough-and-tumble politician” from Appalachian coal country, hoping to curry favor with Nixon and perhaps make a “law and order” impression on voters in time for his upcoming reelection bid.

Rhodes had called on the Ohio National Guard on 32 separate occasions in the prior two years, making his state first in the country for such deployments and causing some to wonder if he was using the volunteer militia as “his personal army.” Before Companies A and C of the 145th Infantry Regiment could get there on the evening of May 2, students had burned down the wooden ROTC barracks in a bacchanal-cum-ideological-statement. “They hated the war so passionately that any level of disruption now seemed justified to end it,” concludes VanDeMark.

The guard had just come from duty around an unruly truckers’ strike and were weary. Some of them were enrolled at Kent State themselves, and others had joined the guard to avoid an overseas war they deplored. Unbeknownst to the protesters, they carried live ammunition and were also wretchedly untrained in the tactics of pacifying campus protests. Nobody could quite explain why they were there, except as a show of force to appease the worried conservative public.

At noon, activists rallied on a gentle knoll called Blanket Hill at the center of campus. After a futile attempt to shut it down with a bullhorn, General Robert Canterbury marched with Troop G and Company A in a confused sweep past Taylor Hall and into an athletic practice field, where several guardsmen knelt in a firing position to intimidate the crowds of students throwing tear gas canisters back at them, plus a shower of rocks. Thought one observer: “[I]f they’re trying to defuse the situation, they’re doing the exact opposite.”

Pursued by students who shouted obscenities and threats, they retreated up Blanket Hill. “As we quickened our pace, they started running,” said a guardsman. “At that point, it just seemed that they were set on overtaking us.” The formation started to break up, and the hapless Canterbury struggled to maintain unit discipline. Another soldier described the retreat as “a lot of yelling, a lot of confusion, a lot of things being thrown.” A student thought the soldiers looked like “scared little boys.” Their gas masks made them look like Martians, sent sweat pouring down their faces, and limited their side vision. Though no student got closer than 25 yards, “all I saw was a blur of bodies coming after us,” reported one of the guardsmen. Then McManus decided to fire his shotgun in a warning blast, a confession he withheld from investigators at the time.

Should anyone think that the mean-spirited discourse of Donald Trump and his many supporters is without precedence in American society, it takes but one look at some of the hate mail that the slain students’ parents received to dispel that idea. “Now you know what kind of a daughter you had—just a plain communist, destructive, riot-making person,” somebody wrote to the parents of Sandy Scheuer, who hadn’t even been protesting and was on her way to a 1:10 p.m. psychology class when a stray bullet caught her. Other letters were much worse, drenched in cruelty and obscenity. Flashing four fingers at each other as a kind of victory salute, some reactionary Kent residents welcomed what they perceived as privileged traitors getting their comeuppance, courtesy of decent society. “The general opinion is that they had it coming and it’s too bad there were only four,” said one.

A more compassionate reaction came from, of all people, Nixon, who handwrote condolence notes to the parents of all four students. “I could not help thinking about the families, suddenly receiving the news that their children were dead because they had been shot in a campus demonstration,” he reflected later. “‘I thought of my own daughters,’ of them ‘learning to talk and to walk, and their first birthdays, and the trips we took together, getting them through college and then—whoosh—all gone.’” The events at Kent State were, he said, “among the darkest of my presidency.”

Hanging in the backdrop of this statement, unmentioned, is that most of the parents of the 58,220 American troops killed in Vietnam experienced something similar without nearly the level of sorrow, attention, and memorialization as the “four dead in Ohio,” sung about by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young within 10 days of the shootings. This is to say nothing of the approximately three million Vietnamese deaths in the war that sparked the protest.

VanDeMark goes through the Kent State events and their aftermath in scrupulous fashion, sometimes minute by minute, laying blame with the jingoistic and even incompetent Ohio National Guard commanders and the escalation of national tensions by the violent elements of the anti-war left. But he takes a more complex and compassionate view of both the frontline guardsmen and the student protesters who faced each other in a conflict that never should have reached such a frenzied apex. He also describes the individual journeys of the killed and wounded students with an eye for insightful details and a sense of empathy.

This is not to say the book is without some faults. It gets off to a rough start with an overcooked description of McManus making his confession on VanDeMark’s tape recorder. And while his revelation of a misbegotten warning shot is an invaluable contribution to the incident’s history—perhaps the most important detail to have emerged in the last 30 years—VanDeMark goes too far by claiming without qualification that this admission “solved the central mystery of the shooting” and calling it “like a jigsaw puzzle in which every jagged edge suddenly slid smoothly into place.” McManus’s revelation is indeed a major scoop, but dispositive statements like this may work against credibility.

The book’s editor might also have reined in descriptions of the work as “definitive” (it is certainly well researched, extensive, and probing, but it is not the last word), the promiscuous use of the lachrymose word “tragic” to describe what happened, and the impression that the National Guard’s perspective had not been included in prior accounts. It most definitely has, though in fairness, not to the degree that VanDeMark has now advanced it.

A section on the frustrating civil and criminal litigation of the early 1970s spools out so much, it could have easily been compressed by half. VanDeMark also has a stylistic habit of running unattributed quotations together in a line, creating an impressionistic effect but making it hard at times to tell who is speaking.

A final wish for further contextualization comes in the very last paragraph, which VanDeMark gives over to multiple blind quotes. The last is this: “If you want to know when the Sixties died, they died on May 4, 1970, right there and then, at 12:24 in the afternoon.” As most historians acknowledge, the energy and verve went out of the anti-war movement in the months following Kent State. While the reasons for this deflation were multicausal, the thought that protest could be an act of conscience paid for in blood deterred many would-be marchers. VanDeMark leaves this dark lesson hanging without elaboration, showing that the Kent State conversation remains unquiet.